Genre: Point-And-Click Adventure
Release date: April 4, 2015

If you follow my reviews then you know that I like to expound on the theme, concept or culture which a game is trying to bring out. Hopefully I can give you, the reader, a feeling for the vision of the game designer and thus an appreciation of just what the game is all about. Unfortunately, I am at a loss concerning this game.  In a nutshell…

ASA – A Space Adventure is just a mediocre Myst clone.

I can find nothing special about it and while it is a classic point-and-click adventure game, there is nothing to particularly recommend it.

The animated sequences are very well done. But they hardly make the game.

The graphics are good, but not what you would call “eye candy.”

Sound and voice acting are good, but not outstanding.

The storyline just isn’t that interesting. You find an alien artifact and it somehow transports you to a mysterious spaceship, but nothing terribly interesting happens. I had a hard time caring about what was going on.

The navigation is problematic. Landmarks are disjointed and it’s difficult to keep track of just where you are and how you are oriented. I had difficulty finding locations, leaving them and then trying to get back to them. Also, from scene-to-scene, you don’t know whether you’ll just click to move or scroll in a panorama. Small arrows in the scene give you a hint, but sometimes they are active hotspots and sometimes not. So each scene must be analyzed to figure out how to move within it. This made immersion impossible.

The puzzles are difficult and not in a good way. Layers of complexity are added just to make things complicated, but they have no meaning in the game. The previous occupant of the spaceship was a French astronaut from the year 2011. He’s left notes to help the next explorer figure out how to use the alien equipment, but his clues are so cryptic that they are just as difficult as the original problem. For example, rather than just translate the alien numbering system for you, he decided to invent his own system which can only count up to five. So now you have two numbering systems to translate. And it gets worse from there. The result is that I found myself feeling relief when a puzzle was solved, not satisfaction.

Clues are hidden all over the place and marked with a small pulsating dot, but they’re difficult to see and you find yourself playing hunt-the-pixel. Again, this destroys any immersion.

The bottom line is that this is a point-and-click adventure and we should be glad that they’re still being made.  But this is not one of the better ones. My final grade is C+ which means that it is playable, but not quite of professional quality – a passing grade.

+ Very good animated scenes   – Problematic navigation – Puzzles unnecessarily difficult – Uninspired story line